War on Reality: How Autocrats are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World

Around the world, our shared reality is eroding. The advent of artificial intelligence, the dominance of the hyper-partisan press and our addiction to social media have all contributed to this degradation, but a critical component of the modern war on truth is one that the average citizen doesn’t know about: coordinated attacks on the truth tellers themselves and the toolkit lifted from authoritarian countries to carry them out in the West.

In this lecture, Nina Jankowicz discusses her experience as a target of these campaigns, case studies from Poland, Georgia, the EU, the U.K., Australia and Brazil, and ideas for how we might return reality to the heart of democratic discourse.

Nina Jankowicz is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (Bloomsbury 2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy, ” and How to Be A Woman Online (Bloomsbury 2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.”

She was recognized for her Distinguished Professional Contributions to Media Psychology and Technology in 2024 by Division 46 of the American Psychological Association. She is the co-founder of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit focused on countering disinformation. Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations and tech companies, and testified before the U.S. Congress, and the U.K., Canadian and European Parliaments.